Part Three: Leveraging Consultants and Pursuing Growth

I remember early conversations with Pat Padgett. As my Dad he carried this regular burden for my success and he would tell me so. He wanted my life to be different and better than his life and the way he saw to accomplish that was college. 


But these conversations also confused me. I would look at my Dad’s life and see happiness and success. I didn’t see a struggling man, I saw someone who knew what they wanted and knew how to run after it. And, as a young man at the starting line of life I was biting at the chomps to also “run after it.” 


But, Pat Padgett was a man who knew things and as my Dad a man who’s opinion I respected immensely. And so, after my Tennessee Nashville Mission I set my sites on college. The school to go to at that time was Brigham Young University, prestigious, known and respected. But, my lack of interest in school caught up with me and I was denied entrance. I instead enrolled at Ricks College with the aim to work hard, prove myself and continue applying to Brigham Young (the comedy of the whole thing is that Ricks College would eventually be absorbed into the Brigham Young University system, becoming BYU Idaho). 


I followed that plan and it worked, I became a BYU student and then… well, then opportunity. I began working for a movie studio, eventually moved to Salt Lake City to pursue an opportunity at a petroleum company. Those opportunities eventually ran their course and I found myself at a dead end. 


Around this time Pat Padgett began throwing around the idea to sell his business. This was my opportunity. I approached my Dad again, he balked, but I expected that. I laid into him and began laying out the reasons this makes sense: having my hands at work in the business would be a big help, eventually I could buy the business, I suggested ideas and opportunities for growth. 


He bit, finally. 


I worked, hard. I did see the business grow. By 1989 — in the midst of a slump in the trades industry — I recruited my brother and we doubled the size of the company. We were hungry and we progressed forward by pure grit and determination. 


One year we decided to invest in a carpet cleaner’s convention in Oakland. There we met Mack Clark, a business consultant. Mack intrigued me because he understood the carpet cleaning industry, but he also understood business in ways I did not. 


I found him after one of the sessions and interrogated him the way only a Padgett could. That turned into a profound moment. That relationship decided my future. Mack talked a language I was yet to speak. He talked about sales goals, future planning, business plans, projected expenses and an opportunity to leverage insurance damage claims. 


I was hooked. 


For a fee and a percentage of our work he would guide me. In a journal I wrote around that time I said this about him, “in return (from the fees I paid him) I would get a consultant who was never wrong because he got paid too much money ever to be wrong.”


That year my brother and I met with Mack Clark was a huge year for me as a business owner. I went from grinding to working smart. I learned things that are in some ways the basics of business, but are only obvious once they’re said. And, having never seen a business at work at this level I put in the work and reaped the benefits. I learned the five functions of management: planning, staffing, organizing, directing and controlling. 


I learned time quality management. I learned to live by goals. I learned to work hard and value an education. 


I left Brigham Young University in 1989 to work in the family business. I thought when I left Brigham Young I was leaving education. But I wasn’t. When I began working with Mack I found myself in another school. This school didn’t finish with a diploma, it wouldn’t go on any resume, but it was the best education I could receive. 


Pat Padgett labored for me to go to school, he eventually relented, but the lesson took root. Jeffrey Padgett made it to school, maybe not in the way Pat envisioned, but in a way that was meaningful and worked.

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